Ross Open Road

2014 MBAs Across America

2014 MBAx Experience

In 2014, Ross became one of the first sponsoring business schools to send team members out on the inaugural MBAs Across America journey. This five-week road trip joined three Ross MBAs and a Haas MBA with visionary American small business owners. The Center sponsored the Ross team to specifically focus on social entrepreneurship, which has become distinctive for the school. MBAx Co-founder Casey Gerald was part of the action too, meeting the team in Detroit.

Ross’s 2014 MBAx team in Detroit with MBAx co-founder Casey Gerald

The 2014 inaugural team, Raas, was composed of Nydia Cardenas, MBA ’15, Stephanie Thomas, MBA ’15, and Saurabh Kumar, MBA ’15, and a fourth team member who was an MBA from Berkeley-Haas School of Business. They spent most of July with Red Tractor Pizza in Bozeman, Brooks Winery in Amity, OR, Ellis Island Tea in Detroit, Batch in Nashville, and Windsor Circle in Durham. The team was aided at launch by Lorpu Jones, MBA ’14, and Ebony Pollard, MBA ’14 in mapping out their trip.

“Because we sourced the projects ourselves, we could be very intentional in the experiences we wanted to have. So, we have projects in marketing, operations, finance, technology. It’s like MAP on steroids.” — Nydia Cardenas, 2014 MBAx-er